


Rumination

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Koko wa Greenwood | Here is Greenwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-16
Updated: 2008-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:05:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another dream eater appears in Greenwood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rumination

**Author's Note:**

> For jamjar. Happy Yuletide!   
>  Many thanks to qwerty for the beta. Any shortcoming that remains is mine and mine alone.
> 
> Written for jamjar

 

 

Sneaking out of the dorm was the second most important thing he had learnt after nine months in Greenwood. (The most important thing he had learnt was to run real fast when a horde of female students approached.) It was now spring, as both the balmy breeze and the scent of cherry blossoms informed him. They did him no good inside his room though. He had been tossing and turning for the better half of the night. Homesickness? Well. Most of the first-year students were homesick. The other omnipresent phenomenon in Greenwood, the lack of feminine presence (unmitigated by the manager's less-than-motherly approach to managing the unruly boys), had yet to make its mark on the first years, still fresh from worlds where half of the population were female and un-manager-like.

It was only after noticing that he had covered almost half of the grounds of Greenwood that he let his mind turn to _the_ problem. It was Friday night, or perhaps already Saturday morning. The assignment for the art class was due on Monday, and he had absolutely no idea what to come up with for the theme, or lack thereof, given by the teacher. 

Then he saw the small, sleek creature, sauntering insouciantly toward him. He chirruped at it without a thought, and after a moment's hesitation, the cat deigned to come close enough to sniff at his fingers. Back in his hometown, he had often accompanied his eccentric mother on her night-time feeding rounds. The things he had seen!

He paused in mid-stroke, ignoring the cat's purring protest as inspiration surfaced from the memories. He gave the cat a critical frown in the dim light, and was delighted to discover that it was a tortoiseshell. He nodded. All the better for his purpose. Then there was a rustle, and a slow smile appeared on his face as a dumpy, sad-looking golden tabby and a frisky kittenish classic tuxedo approached.

It did not took him long to convince himself that it was _not_ animal cruelty. Those creatures would lose naught but whatever little he was taking from them, and perhaps a bit of their dignity. A cat could laugh at a queen, but whoever said commoners could not laugh at cats?

Sneaking back into the dorm and out again with the necessary tool and materials (e.g., bait and Ziploc bags) was a cinch.

* * *

By Saturday night it was finished. Due to the nature of the main ingredient, he had preferred to complete the assignment in the dorm room, rather than one of the studios at school. He leaned back, contemplating his handiwork amidst the snores from the bottom half of the double-decker. He had wanted, at first, to mold it in the shape of an (in)famous mascot of his homeland. Things had turned out differently, he having somewhat overestimated his skills at building cardboard models. 

* * *

There it stood, below a desk in one of the rooms of Greenwood, a form made from the fur of exactly seven cats (though its creator, being a carefree boy, was not aware of the exact number), forcefully fused together in the approximation of a shape even the least self-respecting cat would smirk at. 

Form called to essence. 

The essence of seven distinct feline personalities was brought together, bringing birth to, possibly because of the form, a very confused dream eater. 

* * *

Shun stretched languidly, reveling in the luxury of staying in bed past nine in the morning. As usual, he remembered none of his dreams, if he dreamed at all. The dreams of a resident of Greenwood were rarely made of nice stuff, so to Shun Kisaragi, the capability to either not-dream or to forget one's dreams seemed like a blessing indeed. Being of an upbeat nature, he was beginning to count his blessings when he heard a groan from the vicinity of the kotatsu. Ah! Trust Hasukawa to blight the beautiful morning!

He pushed aside the curtain surrounding his bed. Taking in Hasukawa's crestfallen expression, he called out resignedly, "Good morning. Why the gloomy face? It's Sunday after all!"

Hasukawa looked up from the cup of tea in his hands. "I - " 

A knock on the door interrupted him, and an excited Fred barged in before Shun could issue the invitation to come in.

"Senpai, senpai! I dreamed that the Biology teacher and the school nurse, that's your brother, isn't he? They were - "

Hasukawa groaned again, and placed his forehead against the rim of the cup.

"The Biology teacher?" Shun asked. "Isn't he also the slave-driver who is training our Suka to be Japan's next Iron Man?"

"Senpai," Fred persisted, leaning closer to Hasukawa. "Murakami-sensei had your brother strapped to some sort of wired contraption, and then he - " 

"And then he what?" Hasukawa asked. His lips were drained of color. "Wait. That was where I woke up. Perhaps that's for the best. Don't tell me."

"Hold on," Shun said. "You guys dreamed the same thing?"

"Or rather," a voice from the vicinity of the door answered him in the familiar clipped intonation of Tezuka Shinobu, "different parts of the same dream."

"Shinobu! Mitsuru! How many times have I told you guys not to come in uninvited?" Habit shook Hasukawa out of the trauma of the half-dream, and the shock of the realization that Fred had seen the rest of what happened after Murakami-sensei pulled the masking tape off his brother's mouth. On his feet, arms folded across his chest, he gave his best dorm head glare to the former dorm head and the president of the Student Council.

"Fred forgot to close the door," Shun murmured from the safety of his bed.

"Hah!" Hasukawa ignored his roommate. Adding irate foot-tapping to his performance as the reluctant host, he informed Mitsuru of _his_ half of Mitsuru's dream. _Let both pain and embarrassment be distributed all around!_

Ignoring Mitsuru, who was trying to hush Hasukawa up ("I never did think of Masato that way! Anyway, he was my sister in my dream, and you're the one who dreamed the part after I held 'her' hand. So who's the pervert here?"), Shinobu addressed the rest of the room, which seemed to contain half of the residents by now:

"This is different from the dream cat last autumn, who merely gave most of us weird dreams. Or at least, dreams weirder than the usual. It appears that everyone," here he paused to aim a look at Shun, "or those who us who habitually dream anyway, got a snippet, or rather, the end half of someone else's dream. Before dreaming their own dreams, which got cut off in turn."

"True, true!" one of the freshmen said excitedly. "I dreamed that I was there at The Last Supper, towards the end, and I only knew it was The Last Supper because I saw the painting once on the internet. Judas was saying that Greenwood was spawned from the mating of the house from the Amityville horror and Akasaka mansion, no. 1."

"And I'm Buddhist," he added to the ensuing silence.

"Must be from one of the cult members," a friend remarked in his defense. 

* * *

Mitsuru took the first watch, a book of charms from the Maison Magic in Harajuku ready in hand. Would it work this time too? He wondered as he stared at the gentle rise and fall of Shinobu's chest. Then his gaze moved towards his friend's face, and his thoughts moved in tandem, to his dream the night before. No, not his. Shinobu's dream.

 _Such an austere beauty, sneering down at you from the heights of power and loneliness. No wonder_ she _had wanted to destroy it._

Then Shinobu, still sleeping, raised his hands, as if to catch something unseen. Mitsuru frowned in concentration. Then he, too, saw the creature, held in Shinobu's grip. He aimed a charm at the creature's forehead, and threw.

The charm fluttered uselessly down the edge of the bed, as if there was an invisible wall surrounding the creature. The dream eater bleated, showing its tongue tauntingly at Mitsuru, before jumping over the railing of Shinobu's bed and disappearing into the air, but not before wiggling its misshapen ears playfully at him.

Tossing the book of charms aside, Mitsuru crossed the distance between the kotatsu and the bunk bed in a blink and shook his roommate anxiously, - "Shinobu! Wake up! Are you all right?" - and was rewarded by being fixed by the usual steely gaze.

"It didn't work." 

"Hrrrmph," Mitsuru countered, wondering why, under the overwhelming relief at seeing that his friend was unharmed, he should feel a little vexed at Shinobu for the venial sin of stating the obvious.

"That is one strange creature," Shinobu said.

"Yes," Mitsuru replied, his vexation forgotten in the fascination of the purported dream eater they just witnessed. "I thought we counted them to make ourselves sleep. Not to make them come eat our dreams!"

"Or, rather, mess up our dreams." Shinobu thoughtfully placed the tips of his fingers together and tapped them gently. "Hum."

"Hum?"

"It makes sense. They are ruminants. Ruminants regurgitate their food and chew them again. This one does not stay long enough with any of us to completely digest his dream."

"Eww," Mitsuru shuddered. "I don't know which is worse. Somebody else's chewed dream, or your own dream, thrown up back at you again and again."

Shinobu's answer to this was an enigmatic shrug. Mitsuru wondered if Shinobu would have preferred the other possibility. After all, Mitsuru had seen part of Shinobu's dream. It had not been pretty. 

"And such coloring, too," Mitsuru said, to distract himself from the gloomy thoughts about his friend's dream. 

"Yeah," Shinobu agreed. "They usually come in dirty yellowish white, though I've seen some breeds with black points."

"Even then, I'm pretty sure they don't come in so many colors!" 

"True."

Shinobu looked pointedly at the discarded book of charms. "Perhaps you should call the folks back at the temple. For advice and uh, recommendation of better material?"

* * *

During recess on Monday, while Mitsuru was formulating the question to ask his perpetually surly grandfather ("How does one exorcise a multicolored dream eater that bleats and regurgitates?"), a small, but distinct group of students were huddled in a corner - the corner of the non-dreamers, discussing the interesting state of the cats that had greeted them on the way to class this morning.

"Fortunately, it's now spring," an outraged feline lover snarled, "They could have suffered from hypothermia otherwise!"

"Yea! What a brute," agreed another, though the boy next to him dissented in a quieter voice: "He, or, they, just took the hair near the uh, hind part."

"The butts."

"But - but why just the butts?" Shun wondered. "Was it really just a prank?"

A few boys sniggered as one of the wider-read boys brought up the matter of what depilated cats might be, technically, termed in colloquial English. The bell soon rang to mark the end of recess, drowning out questions from those less proficient in the language.

* * *

It happened on the way from the cafeteria to the next class. Mitsuru's grumbling about his grandfather ("I know that old man. No way would he give me any pointers on this dream eater thing without some nagging about the temple custodian job. If any...") faded away as the aura from last night tugged at Shinobu. Stronger, stronger, it reached its peak, and then, as they proceeded down the corridor - Mitsuru's complaint reasserted itself in Shinobu's awareness. Shinobu raised a hushing finger at Mitsuru, and then, beckoning his friend to follow, knitted his brows and retraced his steps.

He paused at the closed door to one of the art studios.

After a few perfunctory knocks, they walked into a collection of what could be generously called 'art'. Yoshida-sensei was squinting expressionlessly at one of the pieces. Shinobu thought that the handiwork resembled a dead miniature tree. He squinted too, and then realized that it _was_ a dead bonsai. The art teacher heaved a sigh and scribbled something on a pad, probably a failing mark next to the name of the perpetrator. 

"Sensei - " Both Shinobu and Yoshida-sensei tore their gazes away from the poor plant, only to be captivated (at least in Shinobu's case) by another horror.

It was the dream eater, standing atop one of benches and looking oddly in place, flanked by a morose-looking lump of plaster and a stack of matchboxes. 

"A Multicolored Sheep," the label lying in front announced, "by Fred Serene. Materials: cardboard, cat hair, glue."

It had looked bigger the night before. Possibly because cat hair (especially when the cat hair originated from common strays, which were mostly shorthaired) was only so long, to keep in scale, the model sheep was barely taller than Shinobu's index finger. 

"You know," it must be an indication of how the works of art had affected him that Yoshida-sensei did not even bother to ask what business the two of them had in the studio, "I really regret giving out this assignment."

"What exactly is the theme, sensei?" Mitsuru asked, looking accusingly around the room at the various pieces. _A real motley crew indeed_ , Shinobu thought.

Yoshida-sensei hung his head. "Anything. Nothing."

"Sensei, you ran out of ideas, didn't you? Hence the 'free style' theme," Shinobu completed the blow.

The art teacher winced. Shinobu gloated.

"Still, that is not the point. Sensei, when will you finish grading the works?" Mitsuru asked.

"Or rather, just this lot over here," Shinobu said, casting a coveting glance over the neighborhood of the sheep. 

* * *

At first they had thought of just burning the effigy in one of the manager's unwanted tea canisters. However, on the way back to the dorm, as he turned the sheep over and over again in his own hands, Mitsuru saw the amount of work that had gone into it.

"He had to stick every single strand on the cardboard," he commented as he stroke the model down its spine, "Not as easy as it looks."

"I was just wondering how he ever got those hairs in the first place," Shinobu muttered as he unlocked the door to their room. "Unless Greenwood's feline strays are as muddle-headed as the human inhabitants."

"Nah," Mitsuru countered. "My mother said a cat is helpless once you pin it to the ground by the scruff of the neck."

So they decided to let Fred dismantle his own creation, after explaining everything. 

Just to be on the safe side, Shinobu recommended burning the pieces anyway.

"So Fred," Mitsuru said as they watched the flames rise from the canister, producing a smell that only the combination of singed hair, cooking glue, and combusting cardboard could produce, "why a sheep?"

Fred turned a face slightly flushed, whether from the heat of the little bonfire, or the question, Mitsuru could not tell.

"I wanted to make a Merlion. It's a cat too, you know. Well, half-cat, at least. But ah. Scales are more difficult than fur. Also the fish tail gave me a lot of trouble."

That night, again, just as a precaution, they took turns to stay awake. They also made enquiries during breakfast the next morning. Nothing especially violent or odd (or at least odder than the usual Greenwood fare) was dreamt by any of the inhabitants.

The dream eater had been exorcised.

* * *

"A most interesting book," Shinobu remarked from his perch by the window as Mitsuru set down his cup of tea on the kotatsu.

"Oh, this?" Mitsuru picked up the book, which had been lying on the last pages read. "I borrowed it because of the dream, you know."

"Dream?"

"Your dream. Okay, my half of your dream."

"Hmmpfh."

"Did you forget it, like you did the other one, too?" Mitsuru placed the book back on the table. "I remember it, though. At least, the conclusion. Shall I tell you about it?"

Mitsuru decided to take the brief incline of the Tezuka head as a 'yes', or at least, 'go ahead, I don't see how it could hurt.'

"A woman threw a knife at your portrait."

Shinobu snorted. "Did this happen in an art studio?" Mitsuru thought he could hear his friend mutter under his breath: "I bet she must have done this countless times before."

"Yes. It did look like she was a painter. Wait, that's not all. You were there too. You died as soon as she did that."

"Interesting," Shinobu said in a placid tone, as if Mitsuru had just told him the price of salmon in Sapporo, and returned to contemplating the view from the window.

"Hey," Mitsuru said after a futile pretence at continuing his reading of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , "I remember you mentioning that your brother's fiancée, what's-her-name, is an artist, or something like that."

"Rokujou Noriko." Shinobu turned from the window to face his friend. "She's gone from the usual place though. Went off looking for my brother."

Mitsuru decided to take advantage of Shinobu's momentary chattiness. "So what happened before that? In the dream? It's so irritating, not knowing the things that led to such an interesting ending." 

Shinobu returned his attention to the blossoming cherry trees outside. "This is stupid. I forgot it."

"Awww, Shinobu!"

The End 

 


End file.
